The Bowels of Wisdom: Part 1/4

Why the head is not the whole

Nunc ergo dicit Dominus: Convertimini ad Me in toto corde vestro, in jejunio, et in fletu, et in planctu. Et scindite corda vestra, et non vestimenta vestra, et convertimini ad Deum vestrum.

Perhaps you recognise these words. You may even have heard them very recently:

Therefore also, now (saith the Lord); Turne you unto Me, with all your heart, and with Fasting, and with Weeping, and with Mourning. And rend your heart, and not your clothes, and turne unto the Lord your God.

These words are taken from the Old Testament reading for Mass on Ash Wednesday: and it’s the same reading in the Anglican 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the Roman Catholic Tridentine rite and the traditional Lutheran lectionary. Which is to say, until about sixty years ago, these words were heard every year by faithful Christians in almost the entire Western Church.

But I cite them not only out of seasonal nostalgia. In this series of four articles, I hope to show how Christian tradition, reinforced with a draft of a certain flavour of Platonism, has kept the whole – God, human and cosmos – intact from the threat of bifurcation or collapse into irreconcilable multiplicity. By the threat of bifurcation, I mean especially the dualisms of God versus creation, soul versus body, and, perhaps a theme to be examined more fully next academic year, human versus nature; and by the threat of irreconcilable multiplicity, I mean the nominalism, atomism and materialism that have tended historically to be the fruit of such binaries. To put this in more concrete terms, the West today finds itself in a crisis as much philosophical as cultural, wherein the particular is prioritised to such an extent over the universal, that universals – such universals as, say, goodness, truth, beauty, number, male, female, or even the human - are supposed not to exist except as arbitrary maps in human minds, maps which can and perhaps should be rewritten or erased by those in power.

While the genealogy of this situation is long and complex, I venture that it is in part symptomatic of a certain dualistic reading of Plato, typified by Descartes, but of more ancient pedigree, embracing Gnostics and Manicheans in its motley ranks: and I would venture, too, that the cure for such symptoms can be found in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, as interpreted philosophically through the more Easterly and sacramental kind of Platonism of which Dionysius the Areopagite stands as prime exemplar. This, I think, restores the bond between body and soul and so man and God, and makes therefore for the whole.

Here, in part 1, we will begin with the notion of “turning” itself, in the company of a 17^th century English bishop. Part 2 will lead us to T.S. Eliot, part 3 to St Augustine, concluding in part 4 with Dionysius and his ninth epistle.

Lancelot Andrewes

The gimlet-eyed among you may have spotted that the English of the Bible text I cited, Joel 2:12-13, despite its antiquated spellings, comes neither from the King James Bible, nor even from the Book of Common Prayer – which is slightly odd, given that this is the precise text that was preached before King James, by one of the translators of the bible that bears his name, during a Prayer Book service of Holy Communion, in fact on Ash Wednesday, 1619. He was Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), who among other roles served as bishop of Chichester, Ely and Winchester, though it was not in the administration of dioceses that he excelled: rather, he was a scholar and preacher, educated in Latin, Greek and Hebrew in Merchant Taylors’ School, London (where I once had the privilege of teaching), and attained a scholarship in Greek at Pembroke in Cambridge at the age of 16. We can fairly assume, then, that the translation is his own: and to him, precision in words mattered. T.S. Eliot, an admirer of Andrewes’ prose, remarked that he “takes a word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess.” And the word in question in this, his Lenten sermon, is the first the Lord speaks, twice repeated: convertimini. “Turne you unto Me,” it begins, and send “turne unto the Lord your God.”

Lent, Andrewes begins, is especially the time of “turning to the Lord.” But his translation stresses the priority of the nunc, “now,” not present in the Prayer Book version: he explicitly notes that it is the “first word of the Text,” and has it spoken from the mouth of God. Why? Because he wants to make a point about the turning of time, to connect the turning of the spheres with the turning of the human heart, but moreover, to connect the turning of the heart with the bodily actions of fasting and weeping. The turning of the human heart or mind is part of the turning of the whole body, itself a part of the turning of the whole cosmos. The spiritual pilgrimage of the human cannot be isolated to the mind alone, separated from the body or the world.

The point was controversial. Many secular moderns these days, accustomed to seeing the mind as a ghost in a regrettably vulnerable machine of flesh – the “sleeves” of Altered Carbon – may find the idea that what we do with our mouths or stomachs has any bearing on the state of our souls quite risible, but this is not exactly the contention with which Andrewes was bearing. Andrewes’ opponents scorned fasting, and indeed church seasons, on strictly religious grounds. These were live issues, so much so that they would culminate in the beheading of James’s successor, Charles I. But back in 1604, fifteen years before Bishop Andrewes preached this sermon, he had been involved in the extended conference of Hampton Court that pitched his theological commitments – and more importantly, those of his Catholic-baptised king, James I VI – against the demands of strict Calvinist Puritans. For them, the Reformation of the Church of England had not gone far enough, and they sought to abolish such rites of the Prayer Book as using the sign of the Cross and maintaining special feast days for saints. And when it came to Lent, for them, the memory of Zwingli’s prodigious sausage loomed large. Such external matters as refraining from certain foods, or for that matter imposing ashes on the forehead, no longer a practice warranted by the Prayer Book, smacked to them of “works salvation.” After all, did not Christ Himself say (Mt 15:11):

“Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man”?

Well, indeed. But, Andrewes reminds any detractors who may be listening to his sermon, Christ Himself presupposes that His followers will fast with the words, “when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance” (Mt 6.16), by no means repudiating the Word of God already delivered to the prophet Joel. Nor, he argues, is it effective to abolish the seasonal cycle of feast and fast established by the tradition of the Church, replacing it as the Puritans did with a kind of flattened time, perpetually both Good Friday and Easter Sunday:

She [the Church] hath found, this same keeping of continuall Sabboths and Fasts, this keeping of the memorie of Christ’s Birth and Resurrection all the yeare long, hath done no good: hurt, rather.

Left to our own devices about when to fast or repent, we are unlikely to do so at all. Rather, he continues:

It hath seemed good, to the Holy Ghost, and to Her [the Church], to order, there shall be a solemne set returne, once in the yeare at least. And reason: for, once a yeare, all things turne. And, that once in now [q.v. nunc] at this time: For now, at this time, is the turning of the yeare. In Heaven, the Sunne in his Equinoctiall line, the Zodiacque, and all the Constellations in it, do now turn about to their first pointe. The earth and all her plants, after a dead Winter, returned to the first and best season of the yeare. The creatures, the Fowles of the Aire … know their seasons, and make their just returne at this time, every yeare. Every thing now turning, that we also would make it our time to turne to God in.

Bear in mind that in England until 1752, New Year’s Day was not 1 January but the Feast Day of the Annunciation, 25 March, near the Spring equinox. So, the first point to make is that Bishop Andrewes is deliberately equating the turning of the year, that this the turning of the spheres and the return of plant and animal life, with the season proper to the human’s annual return to God – and in so doing, he very deliberately resists his putative opponents’ division of the physical from the spiritual.

Secondly, Andrewes also refuses the bifurcation of soul and body within the individual human being. To turn to God with the whole heart, in Andrewes’ words, requires Fasting and Weeping, both bodily functions. Repentance of heart demands the work of the stomach and the eyes. He stresses this: “The Prophet tells us farther (or God himselfe, rather; for He it is, that heer speaketh) that our repentance is to be incorporate into the bodie, no less than sinne was.”

If sin is of the body, then so must be its remedy. And this must extend right to depths of the body, in profundis, or, as he puts it in quite literally visceral imagery, even “our bowells would turne.”

In the next part, we will turn to T.S. Eliot and his interpretation of Andrewes’ sermon in the poem Ash-Wednesday. Until then, do keep a holy Lent.